Kawazu Shuzo Co., Ltd. was founded as Kawazu Shuzo & Company in 1932 in a brewery built approximately 150 years ago. Since then, Kawazu Shuzo has been using spring water from the foot of Mt. Waita and locally grown rice to make sake. The brewery once made a variety of sake and shochu brands, but due to a decrease in demand for sake, the brewery decided to shut down sake production. After working at an IT company in Tokyo and returning home, the 3rd-generation owner Hiroaki Kawazu took matters into his own hands to bring the brewery back to life. While keeping some of the good traditional processes like funeshibori and fukuroshibori pressing, Kawazu made a number of improvements. Kawazu was able to maintain popularity with the locals, while also bringing his brewery into a new generation by developing new products to meet modern consumer needs.

“We’re aiming for that delicate style of sake that you can only get through brewing by hand. We have a total of 10 tanks, big and small. As a brewer, we don’t have a particularly big production capacity, but that lets us make sake that we otherwise couldn’t,” says Kawazu. Watching the workers dressed in white hurriedly move about the immaculately kept brewery is an impressive sight. Kawazu is looking to the future with its brewing, not just through the experience and intuition of the head brewer, but also by keeping track of lots of data. The brewery’s goal of putting out one experimental sake a year led, through trial-and-error, to Hanayuki Junmai Ginjo, a sake made with Yamadanishiki rice and Kumamoto Yeast. They were finally able to make a sake with a -20 for its sake meter value (extremely sweet) that is very sweet yet clean and matches well with the sweetly flavored dishes of Kyushu, resulting in a sake that sells out every year.“Hanayuki helped me realize the huge potential of Kumamoto Yeast. I want to hold the -20 rating while further improving the quality.” Kawazu continues to make one-of-a-kind sakes that only a brewery of their size can produce.